Chapter 2 Kundalini Rising ~ The end of 'Me'

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My life has not been ‘normal’ since. And yet, it is completely ordinary.

That experience spurred me, inspired and fired me up to begin to search for the answers to some very intense questions that were born that night for me. This was something that was on the outside of everything I had ever experienced, been taught or read. I needed to know, I needed to make sense of what had happened. There was this sense of urgency. At this same time, I had just graduated from college and moved to L.A to find a job, and an apartment and start some kind of life. But after that experience which was more real and bigger than any kind of life I had previously known, regular life was very flat and dull. I basically just went through the motions. There seemed to be little drive to create a particular lifestyle. I was just floating, going from one type of job I didn’t particularly enjoy or find fulfillment in. The career appeared to advance ever so slightly. But it was never my focus. I was a mass of inner contradictions. I had low self esteem and yet was very vain, I was introverted (preferring my own company to that of others) and yet could be extremely extroverted (at parties for example), I was detached yet self involved (narcissistic). One day at my rather dull job, I sat at my desk and asked for “The Truth”. Little did I know that my question would not only be answered but that it would literally take me years to understand the impact of the question. For a few weeks I continued to be carried by life and then came upon Shirley MacLaine’s book “Out on a Limb”. Finally, here was someone in the so called mainstream that I could relate to. She was a mystic and not afraid to admit it. Perhaps that was what I was too? Her book was a wealth of resources and information. Through it I found an amazing bookstore, The Bodhi Tree. Today the Bodhi Tree is still there, in L.A., providing refreshment to dehydrated spiritual seekers and students. That bookstore allowed me to hang out and absorb all this new and fascinating information I had never even known existed in such quantity. The New Age movement in L.A. was in full swing; after all, it was the 80’s. I sifted through masses of books, skimming through them, but only bought a few. I bought A Course in Miracles.

I had heard about it from a few people, a man who worked in the produce department at same food co-op where I volunteered. It was mentioned in Ms. MacLaine’s book as recommended reading. Someone in the aerobics classes I taught knew of the book. When I brought the book home it was bound in hardcover, in three volumes. Now you can buy it in paperback, all bound in one single convenient book. I placed it on the kitchen table and that night a balloon came through the window, it was a silver Mylar balloon and on it was written “Congratulations”. I got chills and a nervous fluttering in my stomach, there were so many coincidences. The Course sat on the kitchen table for about four days. I was getting up the nerve to open it. I sensed that when I began to read it, my life would change. That intuitive hit, proved dead on. The year was 1985; I was twenty-five years old.

A Course in Miracles, explained so much. I learned why I was so fearful, so contradicted,

So secretive, so…so…so weird. But most importantly I learned that I wasn’t the only one who was like this. I learned that 99.99999999% of us human beings are this way. Why, because we think we are separate from Love. That was the beginning of what I can only call a life process. Some people call it a journey, or they say “You are on the path”

But I didn’t know anything about that; I just knew that I was getting clarity on some obvious mysteries within myself. I was learning that life was not what I thought it was on the surface. I took the Course very seriously and read it three times, doing the Lessons in the workbook three times as well. Understanding that the Holy Spirit was the embodiment of Love, in an energy that I could communicate to and with. While the mundane day to day living seemed quite ordinary, underneath subtle and significant changes were unfolding. It became clear to me, that my mind did not work in the way I thought it should. I was very self critical and it took years before I began to understand the entire self imposed mental structure that we all suffer from. The very thing that Buddha meant, that the very foundation of what it was to be a separate identity, a separate human being with this life-story was the cause of all my problems, in fact, the whole world’s problems. To be continued...